CWE-106: Struts: Plug-in Framework not in Use | Glexia
CWE-106 (Struts: Plug-in Framework not in Use) weakness overview with consequences, detection methods, mitigations, related CVEs and MITRE ATT&CK context.
Glexia's Take · Automated analysis
CWE-106: Struts: Plug-in Framework not in Use
Struts: Plug-in Framework not in Use represents a recurring weakness pattern that can create exploitable paths when design, validation, or implementation controls are missing.
Executive Impact
- Integrity: Unexpected State
Developer Pattern
CWE-106 is the kind of defect developers can usually prevent with explicit validation, safer framework defaults, and tests that exercise hostile input or unsafe state transitions.
Automation confidence
high confidence from CWE-106, 4.20.
Generated from the cited source records. This long-tail analysis has not been individually reviewed by a named human.
Official CWE Definition
CWE-106: Struts: Plug-in Framework not in Use
When an application does not use an input validation framework such as the Struts Validator, there is a greater risk of introducing weaknesses related to insufficient input validation.
Unchecked input is the leading cause of vulnerabilities in J2EE applications. Unchecked input leads to cross-site scripting, process control, and SQL injection vulnerabilities, among others. Although J2EE applications are not generally susceptible to memory corruption attacks, if a J2EE application interfaces with native code that does not perform array bounds checking, an attacker may be able to use an input validation mistake in the J2EE application to launch a buffer overflow attack.
Developer And Remediation Guidance
How teams prevent and detect this weakness
Causes
- In the following Java example the class RegistrationForm is a Struts framework ActionForm Bean that will maintain user input data from a registration webpage for an online business site. The user will enter registration data and, through the Struts framework, the RegistrationForm bean will maintain the user data. However, the RegistrationForm class extends the Struts ActionForm class which does use the Struts validator plug-in to provide validator capabilities. In the following example, the RegistrationForm Java class extends the ValidatorForm and Struts configuration XML file, struts-config.xml, instructs the application to use the Struts validator plug-in. The plug-in tag of the Struts configuration XML file includes the name of the validator plug-in to be used and includes a set-property tag to instruct the application to use the file, validator-rules.xml, for default validation rules and the file, validation.XML, for custom validation.
Remediation
- Architecture and Design: Use an input validation framework such as Struts.
- Implementation: Use the Struts Validator to validate all program input before it is processed by the application. Ensure that there are no holes in the configuration of the Struts Validator. Example uses of the validator include checking to ensure that: Phone number fields contain only valid characters in phone numbers Boolean values are only "T" or "F" Free-form strings are of a reasonable length and composition
Detection
- Code review
- SAST
- DAST
- Focused regression tests
Mappings
Related CVEs, CWEs, and ATT&CK context
ATT&CK Relevance
ATT&CK relevance is shown only when reviewed or responsibly inferred.